A/N: This is my first time writing for the challenge at Starvation. This is more drabble than oneshot and I blame the entirety of this piece on the fact that I'm taking painkillers. Book 1 AU; alternate ending with one victor.
connais - to know
"What don't you understand? I won."
His fingers are slick with her blood. He says this to Katniss' dead body not to be cruel or because he's going insane, but because of her final words; three that ghosted from her lips on currents of fear as Peeta raised his blade to put it through her heart.
I don't understand, she had said, and he didn't either, he didn't know why it had to happen like this – why Katniss had to die with blood bubbling out of her chest, running in thick crimson rivers down the fabric of her shirt and staining the material a whole shade darker as it began to dry there under the moonlight.
The cannon fires and he still doesn't understand the reasoning behind all this - the carnage, the barbarism, the sound of life (death?) spilling sanguine from the bodies of twenty-three unlucky youth.
(Does that make Peeta the lucky one?)
He might know why someday.
Katniss never will.